Body image goes head-to-head with power of sport

Thursday

Cheryl Haworth was a big child. She was strong, too - and fast. Born in 1983 in Savannah, Ga., to athletic parents, young Cheryl preferred riding a bicycle or playing sports to watching television.

Cheryl Haworth was a big child.

She was strong, too — and fast.

Born in 1983 in Savannah, Ga., to athletic parents, young Cheryl preferred riding a bicycle or playing sports to watching television.

At 13, she began a weight-training regimen for softball — and stunned her trainers with her strength. Haworth entered competitions, and, at 17, she qualified for the 2000 Olympic weightlifting team, ultimately earning a bronze medal in Sydney. She also competed in the 2004 and 2008 Olympic Games.

But her success came at a price. Weighing 300 pounds (her body-fat percentage is about 28?p ercent, below the standards for obesity), finding a comfortable seat in an airplane or a theater is a challenge. And the pain of training is part of the job.

The movie Strong! (2012) depicts Haworth’s struggle to fulfill the demands that lifting heavy weights requires and find acceptance in a world that idealizes the size 4 body.

Haworth and director Julie Wyman will introduce the screening at the Wexner Center for the Arts and answer questions afterward.

“It’s intended to be the story of an athlete and how she grapples with her body,” Wyman said, “ both on a (weightlifting) platform and how it fits and how it doesn’t (into society).”

Wyman pins much of the blame on the media presentation of being thin as an ideal and being large as a negative.

“Why is it wrong or a sin?” she said. “The logic that makes it a problem is that everybody could be thin. Everybody could be a size 5. But in actuality, that is not true.“

People have to see that inequity exists before anything changes.”

Wyman put difficult portions of Haworth’s life on display — the work, the injuries, the fitting into society.

“She made me relive those moments that I cared not to remember,” Haworth said, “but, in doing so, she told a very poignant and meaningful story.”

Despite her discomfort in reliving bad moments, Haworth is pleased with Wyman’s film.

“I think she did weightlifters a lot of justice — women’s weightlifters — (depicting) the struggles as an athlete and as an individual as well.”

Now a recruiter for her alma mater, the Savannah College of Art and Design, Haworth travels frequently. Squeezing in a workout can be difficult. And she is experiencing changes in her body.

“I’m lighter than I was,” she said. “I’m painfully missing the muscles that were so proudly mine. My thighs are no longer 32?inches, but my waist is around the same size.

“I miss the power that comes from being muscular.”

Haworth hopes that viewers understand the sacrifices that superheavyweight lifters make to reach the pinnacle of their sport.

“We all struggle with something we wish we didn’t have to,” she said. “It’s not about necessarily remembering all those difficult times but realizing that struggling through them is the whole point. As long as people were willing to improve themselves, .?.?. that’s all that you can do.”

Opening night

After two months of renovations, the Studio 35 reopens with two late-night favorites:

“Bad Movie Nite” will present its monthly so-bad-it’s-good flick. What’s playing? Who knows? But the mystery is part of the fun.

The Fishnet Mafia straps on its skimpy, black costumes as the monthly shadow-cast presentation of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) resumes. Let the time-warping begin.

Americans might not agree on the problems facing the United States, but many voice their opinions loudly and forcefully.

The polarization of the United States is examined in Patriocracy (2011), tonight at the Gateway Film Center.

Filmmakers Stephen Nemeth and Brian Malone interviewed politicians, journalists and scholars during an examination of why issues such as the national debt, health-care reform and immigration have turned the debate into a shouting match.

Also at the Gateway:

Willem Dafoe stars as a sportsman who bags more than he bargained for in The Hunter (2011). The Australian film depicts Dafoe as a mercenary in search of an animal thought to be extinct. He lodges with a woman (Frances O’Connor) struggling with the disappearance of her husband.

Works by graphic artists such as Rembrandt, Goya and Picasso — and the anger that fueled their passion — will be probed in Art Is .?.?. The Permanent Revolution (2012).

Revisit love, peace and the psychedelic ’60s with the animated Beatles film Yellow Submarine (1968). Fun fact du jour: Geoffrey Hughes, who played slovenly Onslow on the 1990s British comedy series Keeping Up Appearances (still airing at 8 and 8:30 p.m. Saturdays on WOSU-TV, Channel 34), gave voice to Paul McCartney’s character.

Talk about devotion: A young gangster struggles to care for his mother — who abandoned him for a career in prostitution — while trying to open an elite brothel in the action- comedy Neon Flesh (2010). The movie, next in the “Nightmares on High Street” series, is in Spanish with English subtitles.

People who enjoy cheesy 1950s sci-fi flicks should get a kick from of the films of Christopher R. Mihm.

And at the monthly “Midnight Monster Movie” screening at the Grandview Theatre, Dr. Bob Tesla continues to explore the works of the director with a showing of Terror From Beneath the Earth (2009).

Who is Mihm, anyway?

Mihm inherited his love of sci-fi from his dad. According to his online biography, father and son would rent B movies and bond while watching them.

As an adult, Mihm recruited family and friends to participate in his first film, The Monster of Phantom Lake (2005). Many of the players stuck around to help create cheese fests such as Cave Women on Mars, It Came From Another World and Attack of the Moon Zombies.

And for six degrees of separation fans, there’s a Columbus connection (kind of) in Terror: Michael Cook stars as Dr. Vincent Edwards; actor Vince Edwards played the title surgeon on the 1960s TV series Ben Casey; and Edwards (real name: Vincent Edward Zoino) was a swimmer on the Ohio State University national championship teams of the 1940s.

Tommy Wiseau, where are you? I’m not sure, but his image on the screen at the Drexel Theatre for it’s monthly screening of The Room (2003), the so-bad-it’s good cult cassic. Consider yourself warned.DETAILS midnight Saturday, Drexel Theatre, 2254 E. Main St. Bexley (614-231-9512, www.drexel.net)

ADMISSION $6.50, or $5.50 for students

Radio watching

The idea of an on-screen radio show might seem odd, but This American Life Live! lends a visual element. Besides stories by writer David Sedaris and comic Tig Notaro, the event will also provide films, animation, dance and music.

Hosted by Ira Glass, This American Life began in 1995 on WBEZ in Chicago and is now distributed by Public Radio International.